


All At Once, And Everywhere

by thegoodgirl



Category: Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Hurricanes & Typhoons, Islands, M/M, Natural Disasters, Storms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 19:35:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3180608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodgirl/pseuds/thegoodgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Each day, Ennis and Jack had awoken with someone beside them, and it was that which made them thankful, and that which kept them safe.</p>
<p>AU - Jack and Ennis live in love on a rural island, happy and safe, until a massive storm threatens to end it all. Trigger warning for storms/hurricanes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All At Once, And Everywhere

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic I wrote when I was still in my teens that obviously has some logistical/practical issues in terms of the island itself, but I was always really proud of the prose and its overall feel. Thought I'd contribute it here.

_Dime con quien, andes y te diré quieu eres._

Each day, Ennis wakes upon an island with someone beside him. He’s grown to become accustomed, and yet still that little stirring of confusion is what wakes him, five years later. The sea stirs gently outside, as it does on small islands that lie by it, and so does Jack, grumbling something or rather into the handmade duck-down pillows, perfected by Paloma in the house two clicks from the palm tree.

“Damn it, Ennis,” he murmurs and all the confusion flies off into the sea air. Ennis smiles as he arises and checks the tide out the window, and that’s how, recently, he’s been starting every day. 

* * *

 That morning, he steps out into the ocean air after ensuring Jack has a damn good wakeup call before he opens the store. Ennis hums a Dylan song as he idly feeds his animals, tossing grain to the ground and filling up troughs. The island, small and busy, is particularly bustling today, the women and children running by his front gate - the sea - as they head into their lives. Everyone here lives by the sea, if only through lack of space. The place is a bare pinprick off the coast of Florida, where Ennis had found himself in the spring of 1984 after his father had drawn the family down from New Mexico. This place was one of restoration, a place of new beginnings every year. The positioning of the island, Ennis had grown to discover firsthand, was the centre of activity during summer, specifically that of storms and deadly seasons and women’s names. Every year the island became silent as it was ravaged, rocked and torn and it’s inhabitants sought sanctuary in Cuba or Miami. But nothing could keep him away. Every year, as his father had done with him, he returns to the sea and sand, and like everyone else, begins again.

Because of this, this island is sought after. Some people believe nothing matters here but the tide, that you can be healed and reborn every 10 months like his father had. When Paul Del Mar had arrived in Hurácan, thick and frail and eager to hear stories of restoration and recovery, he quickly grew into the roots of the island, and passed it on to his only child. Even so, Ennis was a spirit who preferred the long uncomfortable stretches of a Alamogordo farm to the confines of the sea, and in the depth of him was the boy who ran and ran across the fields of a place with an acreage too big to mention. He seemed to be too small a person, even for this island, but he discovered something in him every season that always drew him back to his animals, the ocean, and his heart. After his father’s death in 1995, he barely spoke a word for five long years, quietly working and missing him, until Jack had come to the island. It was then he stopped longing for the open space and started loving the smaller ones, where he constantly trips over himself just trying to keep his desire within the confines.

Ennis looks to the sky as a small, light aircraft flies low overhead, and chuckles at the thought of Jack being late to the store, yet again. As he feeds the ducks swimming noisily in their makeshift pond, he progresses to singing to himself. He used to have nothing to say. Now he has so much, he is afraid, as if there isn’t enough time or space to tell Jack everything he’s hidden, and everything there is to say.

* * *

 

In a tiny, open-plan hut on stilts, Jack Twist lies, tired and hot, and listens. He can hear the sea pounding the shore, ducks and chickens making noises as they fight over grains, and if he is quiet and good he can hear Ennis, progressing from humming to singing to muttering to talking to himself about nothing. The sounds are as perfect to him as laughter around a campfire, the little sounds he treats as commonplace as the wind in the palms. Jack swears as he, too, hears the plane swooping low overhead, and struggles to find his clothes strewn across the floor. Even after five years, the life he lives seems mostly strange and foreign, a kind of permanent novelty. To most people, Jack Twist is a person they see every day, who takes them out of themselves and their lives, and reminds them of life beyond the palm trees and stilted houses. He’s one of few on the island who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, who wears a cowboy hat to work and speaks to the only outside commuters, the pilots who fly in their supplies every day. Even so, he’s respected, if only because he is kind and forgiving, and looks out for everyone, especially him which he loves the most.

Jack pulls on his hat and steps into the fresh island air, heading down the path next to the sea and watching the tide go in and out. He’s come to enjoy his private existence with Ennis, who he would see at lunchtime when he comes into town to deliver eggs, feathers and wool, and steal moments with him in the storage sheds behind the store. This is his life, a peaceful routine, one he’d picked up gradually in the few years he’d been on Hurácan. In the Christmas of 1999, he and his wife had heard of existence here, people that needed some help, so they’d transplanted themselves; Lureen running the store and taking care of their daughter, and Jack busying himself with his daily trips, flying supplies, news, messages and mail from neighboring ports back to the island every day. Eventually, as things usually did for him, his marriage fell apart, his wife wanting the ways of the city and opportunity, so he let her and his daughter leave. When it became obvious he couldn’t handle the store and flying on his own, he put the local up for sale to discover that as the island’s biggest business, it was the only thing keeping Hurácan as an American territory, and without it the island wouldn’t receive enough assistance to survive the next storm season. So after a year of exhaustion, they were finally granted an aircraft service and a different pilot every day. The island became attributed personally to Jack, although he thinks very little of the sort.

He sighs to himself as he walks, hands in pockets, kicking the stones and leaves on the ground. He often thinks of his daughter, growing up in the windy city - only Ennis knows how much. Still, he smiles at her being there, as the children who grow up on the island have little opportunity. It’s a fact that they have to leave to become something more than a tradesmen, a store owner or a grain grower here. There are only two schools and no official universities, no money, and most people, once there, never leave. But despite this place, despite the upheaval and loss every year, he finds himself more attuned to the island than anywhere else. People here live not for themselves, but for others, for the land. He’d seen people give their only sand-bags and supplies to the store, just to keep their island, their home, alive. He never says it, but sometimes he feels with a pain in him for those that were born and raised here. He thinks of the natives, of the people who didn’t know how else to be; and of him and Ennis, who do, but prefer it here, if only to protect themselves and keep what they have undisturbed. 

He pulls open the front door of the store and barters flour, fruit, milk and meat to the townspeople. The wind is rough today, and he wonders how long until it starts. He makes a note to ask Ennis, when he comes.

* * *

Almost five years ago, in the midst of unsettled climates and Tropical Storm Adele in 2000, Ennis, along with many young village men, helped Jack re-patch the store, perched upon the veranda that crawled around the stilted hut. The holes in the wooden shack took months to repair, and they worked every afternoon, sweating onto the timber. Jack spoke and spoke, words tumbling out and falling everywhere, conversing with those around him and making ties, but Ennis never looked at him. He would reach down and pick up a piece of board, nail it, reach down and start again, as if he was repenting himself for something he’d done - giving himself back. One day, when the sun was at its hottest, Jack wiped his arm across his forehead.

“Looks like you’re ’onna mission,” he grinned, breathing out into the heat. For the first time, Ennis glanced at him while he positioned a nail, then hit it hard and fast, with a force the made Jack jump.

Ennis only let the smile tug at the corners of his lips as he reached down for another board.

“Cou’ be,” he answered, and nailed the next board down, covering up the last of the hole. Jack stared at him for a time. Then he went back to work, told everyone about his daughter, and it seemed, for the first time, that Ennis was listening.

A few months later, as the weather chilled for winter, the local was restored. It was a sight to see, a wooden hut on small stilts, patched with rogue pieces of driftwood that never seemed to match, no matter what the colour. They squinted into the sun and looked at it.

“Not bad,” Jack shrugged under his cowboy hat, clearly pleased with himself as he wiped his hands with a cloth.

“Mission complete,” Ennis remarked quietly, and with that he was gone down the path back to his chickens. Jack stared after him.

After that, Ennis started visiting the store during the afternoons. He had a new excuse for coming everyday - more grain for the hens, more eggs to deliver; Paloma wanted some more goose down for her quilts or some more wool for her scarves. He never spoke much but let Jack talk about anything and everything, just listened as if this was something he hadn’t had for a long time. The folklore of their coming together wasn’t anything fancy. Jack was drunk enough on the one shipment of wine they received every new year to kiss him in the shadows, and Ennis was drunk enough to kiss him back. Jack let him wrestle with his demons for a while, knowing this was foreign to him, and let him come running back, shoving him up against the storeroom walls to breathe into each other most afternoons. All at once and everywhere, on an island with little that made sense, this made sense to them. And so Mrs Twist took her daughter and moved to Chicago, Ennis said goodbye to the tinted island girl he was pretending to see, and they moved the little they had into the tiny hut on Ennis’s tiny stretch of coastal farm. They said it was to save space, but everyone, and them, knew better.

* * *

 

In the afternoon, after Ennis has finished reinforcing the hen-house, he walks down the road to the store. The sky is heavy and dark, although no rain or anything of the sort would appear for weeks yet. The seasons progressed gradually, and you had to be attuned to the island to know when it was time to leave. In fact, it was known that Ennis, in being on the island before it was completely populated, was the only one who could predict with any certainty when it was time to leave, and he never told anyone but Jack, who was better at taking charge, getting the word out, arranging meetings, boats and flights. Ennis figures they have two, three weeks ahead of them, a month at most, and makes a note to tell Jack, so he would know to get everyone to start packing and reinforcing.

When he reaches the store and climbs the winding stairs that led to the door (the store was one of few huts that had stairs, the rest relied mostly on ladders, or, for the natives, wooden planks nailed to nearby trees) he sees the sign on the door, written on the back of an invoice. _Back in 5 - J. Twist._ He winds his way around to the back and tries the storeroom, thinking the sign is mainly for his benefit, only to find that unusually locked as well. Figuring there’s only one place Jack could be, he heads off, down and around the giant green ferns on the corner of the dirt lane. He finds Jack leaning against the base of a coconut palm on the beach, staring at a piece of paper in his hands, barely reading the words.

Ennis sidles up without saying a word and stands next to him. Jack looks up in his shadow and holds his gaze for a moment, a sense of loneliness within him.

“She still calls me Jack. Nothing else,” he tells him quietly, his eyes going back to the letter.

“ ‘Dear Jack’ ”, he reads as Ennis sits down beside him, feeling the sea breeze in his hair. “ ‘School is going well. I’m passing everything and Mama is teaching me how to sew. She’s saying right now that I should tell you to get a computer.’ ” Ennis lets out something that might have been part of a laugh, and Jack smiles just a little. Apart from a few solar-powered satellite appliances to contact Havana in case of flash floods or emergencies, the island’s only power is in the fire, wind and sand. Jack seems to cloud over as he draws on the next paragraph, and pauses before he reads the rest, with a slight glance at Ennis.

“ ‘Mama finally told me the real reason we left the island,” he continued, and he felt the tension simmering, and Ennis stiffen. “ ‘She says that’s why I can’t visit you, and I probably don’t understand it yet. I told her you said it was because it’s dangerous there, and she says ‘that island does strange things to people; it makes them different’. I still want to see you though.’ ”

He sighs and moves his hand down, staring at the tide as it comes in and out and back again. “How the hell do I reply to that?” he mumbles to nobody in particular. “She thinks I lied to her.” Ennis moves a little closer, stays still, and listens to the nothing Jack says as he rereads the letter, over and over again. He wonders, through all their affinity and devotion to each other, if it means Jack’s missing out on something more.

Later, as they’re walking back to the store just a little too close to be polite, Ennis skims over the letter with his own eyes. _Jack,_ it says at the bottom, _something just came on TV and Mama is crying. She says to tell you a huge one is coming, a scale five, whatever that is. She says to tell you to get everyone out now. Please don’t get hurt. Maybe you can come and see us. From Davina Twist._

Ennis’ heart pounds and he stops in the middle of the street. He turns his head to the left and notices how far the tide is in, looks up and sees how dark the sky is, looks forward and feels how strong the wind is. He swears out loud, and wonders for the first time if they’ll make it.

* * *

 

Everything happens quickly from then on. It takes at least a fortnight for letters to arrive from Chicago due to the isolation, so the storm is already almost upon them. When Ennis tells Jack how much - or rather, how little - time they have, he seems to go white, and spends the rest of the day making sure everyone knows to pack and be ready as soon as possible, swearing down the phone to the Miami, Havana and Nassau authorities as to why they hadn’t been informed a week ago. Ennis, as usual, doesn’t let on what he’s really feeling. As he pens his animals up in their houses and stalls, he can see the deep grey of the sky, the bursts of wind that are bending the trees until they touch the ground, the smatterings of rain that falls, stops, and falls again. It all happens much too quickly than it does in the majority of seasons. _Scale 5. Scale 5. Scale 5._ He hasn’t let himself think it all day, but as lightening crashes through the sky and nearly touches the roof of their hut, he can’t push it to the back of him anymore. His heart pounds and crashes like the waves on the shore as he runs down the road to the store. Nobody else can know but Jack.

He pulls Jack away from the light aircraft heralding the village people on their yearly trip to the mainland and shoves him up the stairs and into the storage room. By now the rain is pelting down with a force that renders them soaking after a few seconds outside, and they have to talk over it, almost shouting, to hear what anyone has to say.

“Ennis, I gotta get everyone onto the planes. They’re panickin- ”

“Scale five, Jack,” says Ennis, hard and fast, his eyes drifting to the door and the sounds of hail, like bullets raining down outside. “Happenin’ too quickly. Not much gonna survive this.”

It’s the most Ennis has spoken in a few days, and Jack is taken aback by it all, stares at him like he’s too scared to agree. “Turned on the radio,” he begins uncertainly, holding his hat to his head in habit, without a need for it. “Mentioned us. For the first time ever. It’s gonna ravage the south. Said Hurácan ain’t expect'd to survive it.”

Ennis, a strange sense of numbness overtaking him, can see the depth of the fear and terror in Jack’s eyes, almost like he’s a broken man.

“Won’t be anythin’ left,” Jack finishes, his voice wavering uncertainly. Suddenly, the store room door flies open, the wind enough to almost knock them off their feet. In one movement, they both lunge and force it closed, pressing their bodies and shoulders against it.

“Gotta tell them, Ennis,” Jack grunts as they shove the door into its place and move away from it.

“Can’t.”

“Have to,” answers Jack, naive, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“Jack.” Ennis cups Jack’s cheek with his hand for a second, the sense of love, loss and departure lingering and almost too much for them to take. “They leave, safe. They stay…”

Jack studies him for a long while before he nods, just a little, in agreement, and Ennis’s hand falls away. “Then why ain’t we out there in those planes?” Jack asks suddenly. Ennis stays still, staring at the door, studying it, an overwhelming calm surrounding him.

“Ennis!”

“Can’t leave,” he whispers suddenly but loud enough to hear, as if it just occurred to him. “Don’t know another way to be.”

Jack’s breath catches in his throat as it all comes over him. “No, no, we- we gotta leave. You heard ‘em, we won’t-”

“You’re mine here, Jack,” he replies, never looking at him, but knowing Jack is choking up, in fear and confusion and turmoil. “Ain’t mine in the real world.”

There’s pain in their eyes, their voices, but mostly deep inside them, knowing they're so used to being together they can’t bear to be apart. It scares both of them, like two captains going down with their ship. For each other, they are it, and in one second Jack turns away and Ennis wraps one arm around him from behind, kisses his neck, and murmurs nothing into his ear.

“I ain’t leaving if you’re not,” Jack whispers finally, and closes his eyes, only to have Ennis push him towards the door.

“Get them people in the plane, Jack,” Ennis says firmly, staring at the door. “Ain’t got much time left.”

* * *

 

Jack convinces the villagers, as the last plane flies away with two empty seats, that he and Ennis are only staying behind to reinforce the last few huts and tend to the animals before another plane arrives. Ennis knows that they’ll be at the rural airport in Havana before they know any better, and by then it will be too late to send another plane. They ride out the start of the storm with their supplies in their little hut as it shivers, rocks, crashes and shakes, as the water washes back and forth over the stilts, as the hail occasionally makes dents in the walls or holes in the roof. They pass the time talking not of what they could have done, but everything they have instead. It’s there that Ennis finally says everything he never had time to say, where he speaks like someone who’s never been hurt or damaged in any way at all. Jack stays silent this time, the words locked safe inside him, and this time shows Ennis instead of tells. There’s a sense of solidarity and calm in being the only ones left, and the love inside is almost too big, too huge, for this island, too big to fall to any kind of torrential storm.

In the eye, they go out and sit on the beach, drinking coconut milk from shells with wine on the side. There’s no unwanted pounding hearts, no fear, no pain. The sea and sky are as bright and blue and clear as a spring day, and if they don’t turn around to look at the devastation they‘re accustomed to, it’s like nothing has ever happened. They aren’t trapped, they both realize, as they hold each other in their own ways, because this is something they can’t have away from this place. This is an island of restoration, of being reborn, and they both know they’ll be reborn together, which keeps them calm and complete during any kind of storm. Each day, Ennis and Jack had awoken with someone beside them, and it was that which made them thankful, and that which kept them safe.

“Do you know what Hurácan means?” says Ennis, his hands around Jack, stealing his bottle of wine as Jack laughs. The uplifting feeling in their hearts is almost too much to contain.

“Ennis, you know I don’t know no Spanish,” Jack smiles, and kisses him before he can answer. When they pull away Ennis pauses, looks at him, and stares out into the sea.

“Hurácan. Hurricane.”

* * *

 

Eventually, they return to their hut, and give each other breath as the darkness comes.

* * *

 

_Dime con quien, andes y te diré quieu eres._

_Tell me who you walk with, and I will tell you who you are_


End file.
